Nutrition Science

Just like any other scientific field, the field of nutrition is dynamic. As new discoveries are made and old hypotheses are disproven, the general consensus on what is healthy and what is not changes. Even nutrition professionals struggle to keep up with the most current research, so we can hardly expect the average consumer to have up-to-date nutritional information.

On this page, you will find sources that provide current, unbiased, and reliable information from scientists, physicians, and other nutrition professionals. For a primer on weeding out bad science, read here.

Center for Science in the Public Interest

Center for Science in the Public Interestis a consumer advocacy organizations whose missions are to conduct innovative research and advocacy programs in health and nutrition, and to provide consumers with current, useful information about their health and well-being. They accept no corporate funds or government grants, and maintains a strict conflict of interest policy for its board members and staff.

Nutrition Science Initiative

Nutrition Science Initiative is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the individual, economic, and social costs of obesity, diabetes, and their related diseases by improving the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research. By funding collective, unbiased research, NuSI works to answer with scientific certainty what we need to eat to be healthy.

UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity

UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesityis a non-profit research and public policy organization devoted to promoting solutions to childhood obesity and poor diet through research and policy. They lead in holding industry and government agencies responsible for safeguarding public health.

Sugar Science

SugarScience.org is the authoritative source for scientific evidence about sugar and its impact on health developed by a team of health scientists from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Robert Lustig, Founding President of the IRN, is one of the Scientific Advisors for the project.

SugarScience has conducted an exhaustive review of more than 8,000 scientific papers, with a focus on the areas where the science is strongest – specifically, on diabetes, heart disease and liver disease. The goal of SugarScience is to take this information beyond medical journals to make it available and understandable to the general public, helping individuals and communities make better decisions about their health and diet.

Personalized / Individualized Nutrition

An old paradigm of nutrition can be characterized as “one size fits all nutrition” or shotgun nutrition. Exemplars of the paradigms are found in models for nutrition such as the Food Pyramid and My Plate. Modern nutrition science is focusing on individualized or personalized nutrition. Here are some resources featuring these ideas.

Doctors and nutrition specialists keep telling us what foods are good and bad for our metabolism and health. But does it work for everyone? Scientists led by Eran Segal and Eran Elinav at the Weizmann Institute of Science find that, surprisingly, everyone responds to the same foods quite different because of their unique gut bacteria makeup. See video explanation of this work below: